


Page One Hundred and Ninety-Nine

by RBennet



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Cursed child alternate timeline, F/M, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-26
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-23 18:20:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12513468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RBennet/pseuds/RBennet
Summary: ‘When did it start? I don’t know. When life as I knew it ended. When the world collapsed in on itself like the crumbling tiles on a dilapidated, Muggle terrace. Like the hope that I once stored in a tight little compartment deep inside my chest, Tupperware-sealed, spilled out like old, cold beans onto a linoleum floor.’Snape and Granger. The darkest timeline.





	1. Chapter 1

PART ONE

 

I.

I choked on nothing, and then on fear.

Harry was dead.

A blurry image, a television re-run. Not black-and-white, but grainy and older. My father laughing. My mother turning up the corners of her mouth in wifely support (even though if you asked her she would admit a preference to Wilde or Lear for her tickles).  _“This Boy-Who-Lived is no more! This, is an ex-Saviour!”_

Harry was dead. Harry was dead. And my mind reeled a Monty Python sketch over and over and over. Daddy laughed. And Ron was so white his freckles had gone. Ceased to be. And Harry was dead.

Limp, in Hagrid’s arms. Like a floppy, scrawny doll. “ _Ceased to be!”_ Harry Potter has ceased to be.

The tang and sizzle of magic clung, tacky, to my skin. The Dark Lord’s shrieks of laughter carried on the smoke rising from the ruins of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

I buried my face in black robes. I squeezed my eyes and hid myself in the sinking, billowing, bat-of-the-dungeons, Death Eater, murderer, Severus Snape.

 

II.

“Get. That. Wand. Out of my face, Granger.”

I bound him. Anti-summoning charm. Wards. And a _Muffliato_ to be safe. The last I said aloud and relished the look of irritation that set in the lines around his mouth.

“What do you want?” I bit off the urge to epitaph him as ‘Sir’ but had no replacement. What else? How many years had I spent railing against the impropriety of ‘Snape’? My hissing reminders of “Pr _ofessor!”_ always punctuated with a glare at two clueless, teenage boys.

For a moment, my tongue tripped over ‘Severus’ and then balked. So, I chose instead a challenging stare and a pointed tightening of my fingers around _his_ wand.

And there went that black brow, arching on cue as though conducted. The rest of his orchestra of derision surely lay in wait. “Why, I’ve come to steal away shrill little Know-it-Alls in the night,” he sneered.

I raised my chin, my guard against his bile. “You’re lying.”

“Am I?”

Well, he wanted a Know-it-All. This one would happily oblige him. “A real Death Eater cannot cast a Patronus,” I said in my best classroom voice, ready to preen in the wake of the praise I knew I would receive. Except from him. Never from him. Only grudging ‘O’s in red ink so thin it looked as though it had been scratched onto the parchment only in extreme reluctance. As though it just _pained_ him to award me any merit.

And of course, _Professor_ Snape didn’t disappoint. He smirked – the slow, curling edges of his thin lips (chalk-pale unlike his blood-deep ink) that meant he was about to decimate the Gryffindor points total – and bent his head closer so I could feel his humid breath on my face. “And _where_ did you read that?” He sounded amused. It was terrible – the low, swooping feeling I got in my stomach when I might, just, be wrong – and I wished he would go back to the cold, classroom tyrant. Back to the Professor Snape who would never hover inches from my face with an insidious gleam in his black gaze.

“I..“ Stumbling, foraging, scrapping for words like I had for the meagre breakfast of berries that barely filled my clenching stomach. They would not fall off my arid tongue. “I can’t remember. I assumed-“

“You _assumed...”_ he drawled, leaning as close as he could in his restraints. The conjured ropes creaked. A whisper now, a hair, a micron. “ _Legilimens_.”

The last syllable of the spell was uttered and he was in before I could wrench myself away, flying back and diverting my gaze to the safety of his torso. I sputtered, wiping my eyes, blinking as if it would clear my mind of his invasion. “How- that’s-”

He attempted a shrug in his confines. “How dare I? I _am_ a Death Eater, Granger.”

I looked up. I itched to smack the smirk from his face. Punch him square on the nose like I did Malfoy.

My ragged nails bit into my palms. We were at war. We were desperate and stinking of misery, it was Christmas and Ron had left and Harry had nearly died at Godric’s Hollow and we were nowhere closer to defeating You-Know-Who then when we had left the warm, safe, food-filled halls of Hogwarts.

The hunger and the cold and lack of civility had eroded my patience to a bitter stump.

I tried to reign in my temper, regulate my breathing and Snape watched seeming profoundly bored. “One would have thought,” he said, leering, “a girl as supposedly intelligent as yourself would have prepared a prophylactic against such an… intrusion.”

A sound, a growl, came from my chest. In two long strides I cross the tent and I had his wand up at his throat once more. My magic crackled, stirring up his fine hair like static. “Why are you here?” I asked again, ignoring the way his nostrils flared – wind, brass, strings – and the line between his brows deepened.

“There is a spy.”

“Yes.” I clenched my teeth. My patience was not just gone, it was fifty miles up the M5 to Birmingham. “It was meant to be you.”

 _I thought I could trust you_ , I wanted to shout. _I thought I could, and then you went and did something so monumentally stupid, like murdering Dumbledore_. My rational, sensible, logical mind was still fumbling for a justification that would exonerate. That would justify. Something that I could pin the last shreds of my hope to.

“No, someone else,” he said, voice strained. I realised I was pressing the wand very hard into his oesophagus making a marked indent in the skin. So, I kept it there for a few more seconds hoping to leave a bruise that would need a paste. “Either in the Order or on the periphery. Someone you know, someone you think you can trust.”

 “Who?”

“I don’t know,” he ground out.

I let him breathe more comfortably and stepped back. “But no one knows where we are. Apart from you apparently,” I added, as a petulant afterthought. Yes, how _had_ he found us? I had been so careful.

 “You cannot run around in the woods forever…”

“I know that,” I snapped. Really, properly, bit his head off.

“…and when you and your dim-witted friends remerge,” he continued through a curl of his lip as though he did not hear me, “knowing who you can trust may mean the difference between winning and losing this war.”

He was right, the self-satisfied berk. “You need to find out who it is.”

He gave me a look; the kind of look he gave particularly thick first years that didn’t know which end of their cauldron was up. “If you have any insightful suggestions…”

I threw my hands up and his eyes followed his wand. “I don’t know. I’m not the master spy!”

He glared.

Emboldened and prepared for any mental assault, I returned it with relish.

His long-suffering sigh was somewhat diminished by his bindings; however, the eye-roll was present and correct. “Think. Has anyone being acting differently? Before you left on this little jolly camping tour of the British Isles, did anyone knew insert themselves into your lives? Ask questions, stick their nose in your business?”

I frowned: had there been anyone new? I rattled through my mental address book – the DA, my fellow housemates, the Order…

“Merlin, Granger, I can practically see your fingers twitching for a quill and parchment.”

I shot him a look, but he was not wrong. “Give me some time, I’ll-" I summoned my bag. "I'll put together a list.”

He scoffed. “I’m sure Potter will be thrilled when he returns to have the extra company for tea.”

I blinked. Yes. Harry. How long had it been since he had stumbled after Snape's patronus into the forest? I had been dozing when the wards wailed for attention, and only managed to catch the faint pin prick of Lumos disappearing among the trees. I nodded. “Give me a week. We might need to – wait, how did you find us?”

He raised a brow, his gaze flicking to my beaded bag.

Shit. Shit shit shit. “Headmaster Black.” I closed my eyes in defence against the wave of sneering smugness that was about to roll my way. Stupid. Tired. And making careless, careless mistakes.

“Speak your location into the bag and Phineas will relay it to me.” He paused. “In confidence.”

I took a deep breath and met his shuttered gaze. His entire body was still, lines softened. Sneer-less. Not the shape of the cold Potions Professor, nor was it the insidious Snape: Death Eater. It was new.

I nodded once, then prepared to levitate him out and outside the wards and set him free like a trespassing spider.

But then, with a click, the ropes around him fell away and his wand flew from my hand into his. As he went to leave the tent, he paused and turned around. There was little inflection in his tone, his face a void, the orchestra quiet.

I tensed, but he did not move.

“A Death Eater cannot cast a Patronus charm, not because of their nature, it is because they have no need to learn how.”

 

III.

He tells himself later that he had _let_ her disarm him. To make his point clear, to deliver the information. As a lesson.

Not, of course, that he was so preoccupied with disabling her delicate, intricate, complexly beautiful wards, he forgot to anticipate that of course she was Muggleborn and would not think twice about merely tackling him to the ground.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Underlined = taken directly from the books. Thank you JK x

IV.

Two weeks later I found my opportunity to summon my new best-friend Death Eater.

Two weeks of a simpering Ronald Weasley pouting and puppy-dogging. Two weeks of Harry pinging about the tent, going from elation to despair and back like a trick yo-yo.

The North East coast in January did little to mind the bleak and desolate mood that had descended when we ran out of anything to say to each other. All ground, all trodden. A negation enough to temper my doubts on the 'Great Bat'. Risk assuaged, I felt the need for forward momentum.

And so I stood with my heels in the sand. The North Sea rolled up the shore and kissed the frostline and retreated. My hair, for once, behaving beneath a fluffy blue hat. I braced against the wind-chill, snug enough within my warming charm.

I spoke our location into my bag, enunciating clearly as if leaving an answerphone message for a deaf aunt. "Marske-by-the-sea." 

The wind whipped by again, chilled and unforgiving. Somewhere over that grey water was Azkaban. Empty now. I twisted the bracelet through my fingers. The chain, chunky and golden, would be happier on a thick, hairy wrist crowning meaty sovereigned knuckles.

It was a decoration summoned from some deep chasm; memories of my muggle childhood and the _Argos_ catalogue that sat on the bottom shelf of the telephone table, a thick, glossy tome that took two hands to lift but a feast of treasures for five-year-old Hermione to covet. I remembered flipping from tents to watches to jigsaw puzzles utterly in awe.  

And so, due to my apparent inability to banish that double-page spread from my imagination I now possessed the most appallingly tacky device ever used for subterfuge. Q, I was certainly not. And I could only hope Snape cared little for the stylishness of his bling. 

He appeared after ten minutes on the edges of the wards, glaring into a space six feet to the left of me. My spine straightened in an automatic response to his presence. With a wave of my hand I let the curtain of magic fall.

“Well, Granger,” he grunted. “I don’t have all day.”

I handed it over cringing again at the gaudy faux-gold.

“You shouldn’t have.”

“It’s a Protean charm. It’s how we communicated in the DA. I based it on…well,” I bit my lip and nodded at his left forearm that was concealed beneath his usual thick black robes.

He frowned at the bracelet as though it had sprung to life and pissed in his hands like a nervous kitten. “I am not wearing this.”

I stared at him. He glared back. _Bloody, insufferable man._

“Fine,” I said huffily, and brought my hands under my collar and pulled out the fine gold chain, “you have the necklace.”

The flat pendent held the warmth of my body heat and as we swapped I felt an unexpected rush of embarrassment thinking about how it would pressed against his own skin. I cleared my throat and thrust the bracelet onto my wrist.

“And if the wrong person sees it?” The necklace dangled from his fingers, swaying slightly in the wind.

“Do you have a habit of undressing in front of You-Know-Who?” I asked, archly and still flustered. His stare could have singed my hair. “Just say it was your mother’s or something…”

Snape shifted on his feet, as if the topic of mothers was of supreme discomfort. It occurred to me that I had never seen him embarrassed. _Mother._ And yes, that was the same unfortunate nose perched between dark, pinched brows; he looked at the necklace with his brows drawn the same way as Eileen Prince had scowled at her winning Gobstones thirty years earlier.

He opened his mouth. Then shut it. He shoved the necklace over his head, chain snagging in his hair.

To fill the silence, and to force down the plume of pity that threatened to rise, I resorted to explanation. “The messages have to be short, to fit. But this way we can communicate instantly. In- in case there is an emergency.”

He nodded once, sharp, then spun on his heel and popped away.

That night, a message warmed my wrist: _Adequate, Granger_

 

V.

Any theories?

_Many._

Care to share?

_No._

_#_

Harry is cracking.

_I don’t care._

You should.

_Your job, Granger._

_#_

Mundungus?

_Insipid worm. But, no._

Percy?

_Who?_

Weasley.

_Idiot. But, no._

Lavender Brown?

_Stop suggesting her._

The butler?

_I’m not Miss Marple, Granger._

_#_

_Are you safe?_

_…_

_Granger?_

_…_

_GRANGER._

Yes. Safe. Close one.

_That was foolish._

Lovegood?

_Alive._

_#_

Weather is nice here.

_Shut up, Granger._

Nice there, too?

_It’s Scotland._

_#_

_IDIOT! TABOO!_

_...._

VI.

The blood left my tattered bottom lip, metallic and sharp. I heaved in a breath and tears threatened to fall.

“You are lying, filthy Mudblood, and I know it! You have been inside my vault at Gringotts! Tell the truth, tell the truth!”

Bellatrix flicked her wand and red heat seared along the veins of my forearm. I cried out and tasted salt. 

The witch straddled me. My wrists pinned with magic. 

“What else did you take? What else have you got? Tell me the truth or I swear, I will run you through with this knife!"

She pressed the dagger to my neck, grinning with rows of teeth the colour of bile. I groaned, the only sound I could muster, and the metal was cool against my skin. Bellatrix frowned as though disappointed at a naughty child, then smacked the flat of the blade hard across my face.

I yelped. My cheek stung, then the wet, warmth of blood began to trickle from the nick.

The dark witch reared up, demented, brandishing her wand. “What else did you take, what else? ANSWER ME! CRUCIO!”

The shock hit before the pain. For a second I could see nothing but hot, white light. Exploding down my spine, burning within my limbs. Steel bands tightened around my chest, I couldn’t breathe. My hands shrivelled down to claws, every muscle spasmed, quivering then contracting tight. There was the cracking, crunching sound of bones in my toes.

My screams grew hoarse, tearing through the soft tissues of my throat.

It stopped. I shook and writhed on the floor like a panicked flobberworm, pulling desperate air into my lungs.

Eyes. Crazed dark eyes. Her face inches from mine. “How did…” Bellatrix had started, with her spittle flying into my face. Then stopped. Her terrible eyes glanced over my huddled, foetal form, to the room behind me. “Snape!" She screamed. "What are you doing here?”

“Good evening, Bellatrix.”

I began to crawl back to the surface trying to fix my consciousness to the conversation. The pain had cease but my legs racked, cramping and releasing.

But.

Snape. Snape was there. All I could do was watch my own saliva pool on the grey of the flagstone.

“What _are_ you doing with the Granger girl?”

I whimpered, I think.

Bellatrix must have brandished the sword at him. “That was _meant_ to be in your vault. Careless,” he admonished. I could hear the sneer in his voice.

“SHE took it. I bet you were helped by that dirty little goblin in the cellar, weren’t you?”

My voice broke. I broke. But I begged, “We only met him tonight! We’ve never been inside your vault…it isn’t the real sword! It’s a copy, just a copy!”

“A copy?” Bellatrix screeched. “A likely story! CRU-“

“Stop!" Snape’s shouted. “This is ridiculous! If the girl does know something then torturing her until she’s as addled as the Longbottoms is idiotic. Let me look into her mind.”

There was a long silence, then Bellatrix huffed. “Fine.”

Firm fingers grasped my chin, wrenching my head up, forcing my eyes to meet the blackness of his. “ _Legilimens_ ,” he whispered.

It wasn’t like the time before – gentler. Softer. _Trust me._ Not even a push and then he retreated.

I was thrown to the floor, crumpling like a soggy cardboard box. Empty, my contents delivered all over the floor. “The girl knows nothing,” he said without inflection.

“Then there is no reason to keep her all in one pretty piece! Let me play with her a little longer?” Bellatrix sulked like a crazed toddler with the power to kill.

“No,” Snape said with barely restrained patience, “she must be brought before the Dark Lord, he will want-“

I did not hear so much of the rest, too busy fighting the urge to pass out. As he tells it now, it was a right ribald tale - quick spells and quicker vernacular that would put Dumbledore to shame. But, as I understand, somehow, he held me upright and had his wand to my throat, pressing hard, I suppose as karmic retribution for the damage I’d done him.

“HERMIONE! LET GO OF HER!” Ron screamed, shaking and red with rage. “I’LL KILL YOU, SNAPE!” Harry had him by the arm. Harry had two wands. Dobby was there. The whole world spun and if not for the grip of the man behind me I would have certainly fallen back to the floor.

"Try me, Weasley and I will turn you into ashes," he said. My captor-saviour. 

I remember the chandelier began to rattle, the tinkling of crystal growing louder. I glanced up to see it come loose from its mooring. As it fell.

He wrenched me roughly to the side and there was the familiar squeeze of side-along apparition against a hard, warm body.


End file.
